A Brief Discussion on All in One SEO vs. Yoast Plugins

The terminology, plugin , is widely used in website development. At times, it is also referred to as add-ins, add-ons, and extensions. All these aliases undoubtedly contribute to its relevance. To put it simply, it is a software component that adds a particular feature to an existing computer programme. Thus, when a plugin is added to a programme, it enhances customisation. WordPress developers use plugins almost every now and then in web browsers to incorporate newer features to their websites.

Now, when it comes to choosing SEO plugins, the entire fraternity of developers oscillates to and fro between:

All in One SEO (AIO) and

Yoast

Both of these are packed with an array of impressive features. However, when it comes to making a choice between the two, it becomes quite difficult for almost everyone. In the following paragraphs we will try to furnish the prominent features of the two plugins, so that developers can make their own choice conveniently based on the facts.

History

All in One SEO came into existence in the year 2007 and was created combinedly by Michael Torbert and Steve Mortiboy.

On the other hand, Yoast SEO was created in 2010. Initially, it was named WordPress SEO and was created by Joost de Valk.

Similarities

Both All in One SEO and Yoast focus on on-page optimization or technical SEO. The effort in on-page SEO helps to make the codes more easily readable by search engines. Alternately, it helps search engines understand better a website. The efforts in this aspect include

Creating catchy, unique titles

Using meta descriptions

Interlinking the constituent webpages of a site

Taking special care of the site architecture and the overall code structure

Search engines, it is relevant mentioning here, are usually competent in parsing poorly formed codes. However, human mind is not so adept enough in this aspect. Coding errors obviously hamper the visibility of a website.

Now, both AIO and Yoast prove helpful in improving the structure of a WordPress site, making it more organized. Moreover, both the plugins help to remove lesser relevant contents. In addition to that both of them remove contents from the index that are not worthy of indexing.

As Google is the major search engine and is immensely popular among the vast majority of internet users, both AIO and Yoast are focused particularly on Google. Interestingly, most of the Google-centric features are supported on Bing as well.

Yoast at a glance.

However, Yoast has a more robust content analysis procedure as compared to its competitor. It performs several checks on content thoroughly. Moreover, it also weighs the structure of the title, subtitles, meta tags, and images, etc. Based on the overall assessment, Yoast provides reading score to every content.

In contrast to this, All in One SEO lacks this advanced page analysis feature.

Both AIO SEO and Yoast possess the ability to affect the way search engines index the content. In Yoast, there is an Advanced tab to work on the said aspect. The first Meta Robots Index allows to control the search engine indexing. Activating No Index option is ideal for content that is not upto the mark in terms of quality. Particularly, the option proves effective for e-commerce stores having thousands of duplicate product description. One can set the No Index option active for less important products and focus on writing description for the popular products when one is running against time.

On the other hand, the Meta Robots Follow option prompts Google if one wants to follow links. Link juice is a major ranking factor for Google and the links that are followed pass the valuable link juice. On using this option, it sets no follow on all links including one’s internal links as well. Technically speaking, one should not no follow one’s own links as in such instances, Google may ignore some of its content. In worst case scenario, the search engine giant may also penalize the site in question for indulging in the outdated practise of unethically generating page ranking.

The Meta Robots Advanced provides a number of options to control caching, archiving, and image indexing, etc. For majority of bloggers, this setting should be left to None. Breadcrumb titles are the tiny textual links that indicate one’s location on the blog and appear on top of the pages.

The Canonical is another crucial feature and is used when there is one or more identical pages in a website. By virtue of this feature, one tells the search engine to use alternative page URL in place of the current one. Thus, this feature also helps removing duplicate content from both WWW and non-WWW versions of a web portal. The Google Search Console provides the option of setting one’s preferred domain.

When one want to view one’s site statistics in Google, one can connect the Google Search Console account with the particular WordPress site using Yoast. The plugin also integrates with Google Analytics, Alexa, Facebook, LinkedIn profile, YouTube Pinterest, and Google+

All in One SEO plugin

The AIO plugin automatically generates a sitemap for a website. Moreover, it automatically “pings” both Google and Bing once the site owner publishes the sitemap. The ping option informs the search engines that the particular site may now have new posts or new site maps. Thus, both the search engines trigger the crawling process to the said website.

AIO helps to index tags, posts, categories and pages. Moreover, the All in One SEO plugin generates a sitemap based on published posts and pages. Additionally, the plugin ensures every time the search engines crawl a website, they get the latest URLs.

The AIO provides a General Settings option that contains almost all the useful features for the homepage of a WordPress site.

The canonical feature in AIO, in contrast to that in Yoast, does not require a owner to work on page by page approach.

The keyword section is also slightly different than that in Yoast. It allows owners to automatically set keywords in the Meta Keywords tag. All in One SEO allows owners to use tags for meta keywords and dynamically create this list with each post. Interestingly, the meta keywords tag is not used by any major search engine.

The final takeaway

Now, to sum up the entire story into something short and simple, it is worth saying that All in One SEO, just like Yoast, happens to be a plugin is rich in features. However, it is basically for folks who possess a clear understanding of search engine optimization and do not need to know all that are required for page analysis. It is meant for them who already have certain knowledge about how to optimize each component of a webpage.

In contrast to that Yoast is generally meant for people who do not have much clarity on the basics of search engine optimization.

For any adept WordPress developer deciding in between AIO and Yoast is not easy. It basically depends on an user’s requirements and preferences.